That Obama isn’t pouring — and I mean pouring — money into solar and other green jobs is one of the things that infuriates me the most about him. That is the future and, again, we’re falling way behind. What a missed opportunity. It’s a tragedy.

Remember back in May when a guy wandering around a field in Britain found an ancient Roman helmet? Well, here’s the next chapter in that story:

In just three minutes at a Christie’s auction, the most hauntingly beautiful face to emerge from the British soil in more than a century slid out of the grasp of the museum desperate to acquire it when the Roman helmet was sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for £2m – dramatically higher than the highest pre-sale estimate of £300,000.

The man who found it last May, using a metal detector on farmland on the outskirts of the Cumbrian hamlet of Crosby Garrett, a currently unemployed graduate in his early 20s from the north-east, will share the price with the landowner, but is now a millionaire.

Tullie House museum in Carlisle managed to stay in the bidding up to £1.7m, a staggering sum for a small museum raised in gifts and grant promises through frantic fundraising in the last month. Three more bids of £100,000 each lost it the treasure.

“I’m still shaking,” Andrew Mackay, senior curator at the museum, said moments later. “Cumbria has had a few bad knocks recently, and this fundraising campaign was a good news story for the area, so this is a real blow. People will be terribly disappointed – we had thousands of pounds coming in every day, and children literally emptying their piggy banks.

“We are now very, very anxious to talk to the buyer to see where we go next.”

The stunning Roman cavalry helmet, dating from the late first or early second century AD, a piece of public swagger for parades and festivals never meant to be worn in combat, is only the third ever found complete in Britain, the first since 1905, and by far the most beautiful.

A Mississippi judge ordered an attorney to spend several hours in jail Wednesday after the attorney chose not to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in court. The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal reported that Chancery Judge Talmadge Littlejohn told a court audience to rise and say the pledge. People in the courtroom said Danny Lampley of Oxford stood but did not say the words.

This morning the Republican National Committee blasted out a story from The Hill about a new nonpartisan study finding that the poor will be hit hardest if all the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire. An RNC spokesman, taking a shot at the Dems’ failure to extend the tax cuts, rhetorically asked: “What excuse will the Democrats use now?”

Here’s the funny thing, though. While that study does indeed find that letting all the tax cuts expire does disproportionately hurt the poor, it also finds that the plan Dems have actually proposed on the Bush tax cuts is better for the poor than the Republican one.

The study by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, took a look at how letting the tax cuts expire impacts the after-tax income of people at different income levels. The study’s numbers show that letting them all expire would hurt the poor more, because the change in income would matter a lot more to them.

But using this study to attack Dems is misleading. Republicans are framing the current policy dilemma as a choice between keeping all the tax cuts or letting them all expire. But Dems aren’t proposing to let all the tax cuts expire. Rather, they would continue the tax cuts for those under $250,000, while letting only the high end ones expire. The Congressional Dem plan would also renew some temporary stimulus tax-break measures enacted last year that are set to lapse.

As it happens, the study compared the actual Dem plan with the GOP one. And it found that for a family of four with an income of $40,000, the Dem plan — continuing the low end tax cuts, plus the stimulus measures — would cause a 7.8 percent jump in after-tax income. That jump would only be 6.8 percent under the GOP plan to let all the Bush tax cuts expire.

This is exactly the kind of story the Republicans count on Fox and their myriad of radio talkers and think tanks to tell only a small part of — the part contained in the first paragraph. You won’t hear anything about the second paragraph or the other details showing that the Democrat’s plan is actually better for the poor than the Republican’s.